Items Tagged with 'great lakes'

Congestion is snarling West Coast ports and capacity for U.S. ag exports is dropping as ocean carriers agree to send back empty containers to China, but upper Midwest farmers, food manufacturers and forestry product producers are about to get access to a new path to buyers around the world.

The American Farmland Trust announced a new model geared toward increasing the use of conservation practices in the Great Lakes Basin by engaging women landowners, the operators who lease their land, and agricultural retailers through workshops, toolkits and “learning circles.”

The Department of Agriculture will start offering landowners and farmers a chance to enroll in 30-year Conservation Reserve Program contracts starting in July.

President Trump’s fiscal 2019 budget proposal foresees an Environmental Protection Agency significantly smaller in both budget and personnel.

New approaches to nitrogen management, developed at land-grant universities, are changing the paradigm for farmers, prompting them to use less fertilizer, save money, and help reduce the toxic algal dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, the Great Lakes and other bodies of water.